Localism and Radical Moderation

It’s election time in our small town, as it is in many places across the nation, and as I sift through the campaign material I’m struck, as I often am, by how interesting local politics is and also how much broader political partisanship is starting to ruin what’s so special about local politics in the first place.

First, let’s just admit that I’m not an unbiased observer. I’m a student of the American founding, I’ve done some work on Tocqueville and localism, I’m a fan of federalism, and a lot of my research work focuses on decentralized networks. I’m also a Catholic convert, and the principle of subsidiarity also plays into what follows. But what all these related ideas share in common is the belief that governance questions should be handled at the level of government that has the information and ability to tackle that problem. (And if there is no level of government with that information and ability let's just leave it alone). This is why, for example, zoning issues are a local concern while national security is a, well, a national one. The national government doesn’t know and can’t adequately decide for local communities how best to use their zoning powers and local governments certainly don’t have the expertise to deal with issues of international terrorism. Any particular political concern is best handled at the level where people have the expertise and local knowledge to deal with it. This isn’t a perfect system, by any stretch, but following Hayek’s arguments about how knowledge in society is disbursed, it seems pretty basic and pretty important. (I’ll also add that we probably use political solutions way more than we should, but that’s an argument for another post.)

Watching my own town’s current election for town supervisor and town board, I find that there’s a disconnect between the kinds of problems candidates are bringing to the table, and that may connect to broader distortions within politics generally. As just one example, the progressive candidate criticizes the Republican leadership for not prioritizing climate change. Is climate change important? Of course. Will we likely need various kinds of plans in place to help deal with extreme weather events? Yes. But are town resources best spent actually tackling climate change? Probably not. Given that this is a town with few locally own vehicles, no police department, a volunteer fire department, and a handful of trucks used for yard debris collection, I’m not sure what strides, if any, a town this size can make toward mitigating climate change in any kind of meaningful way. Moreover, it’s not clear why going zero emissions in a small town like ours is a more useful goal to mitigate climate change than the things the current town supervisor is already doing, such as preserving green space, increasing walkability, and so on. Additional steps to address climate change would in all likelihood be simple virtue signaling, which is probably not the best use of scarce local resources no matter what your political interests.

The same goes for various social justice policies, such as the candidate’s argument that we need a plan for climate refugees. Really? It’s hard to see how climate refugees are different from other refugees in their basic needs and we already have a well-oiled civil society-government partnership in our area for resettling local refugees, though not in our town proper. Climate refugee planning seems like it would be best addressed by thinking more seriously about low-income housing options in our area, if we decide that's something that's worth doing, which it may not be for a lot of complicated reasons.

I think what I find so interesting about some of (not all of) the politicians running in our small town is that they seem to misunderstand what it is that local government is very good at and what it is is not. Voltaire suggests at the end of his satire on idealism that instead we should "cultivate our garden", and that didn’t mean trying to make your local garden fit some larger ideological vision. In fact, quite the opposite.

But it’s not just progressive politicians who misunderstand local politics. Conservatives do their own version of this in various ways, as when critical race theory hysteria hit some of our local school boards. But I do think because progressives seem more attuned to broader structural issues and also more comfortable with government power, they make this mistake more often than conservatives do. The reality is that local politics in general doesn’t fit well within standard party lines precisely because people can have (and should have) very different ideas about what government is capable of on the local level versus what it’s capable of doing on the national level. My local town has preserved a lot of park land and puts a lot of resources into walkability, presumably because those are issues that will make all our lives better, even if only by increasing our property values. As a person who lives on a busy road and whose house was actually driven through recently (yes, actually driven through) I may support more active road management at the local level than I would at, say, the state level. I’m also much more comfortable with my small town buying the development rights for the farmland in the area as a way to preserve the agricultural character of the community than I would be if the federal government bought out large swaths of agricultural land for some random reason. I can very reasonably argue for limited government on the national level but much more activist government on the local level and be neither an idiot nor a hypocrite. At least at the local level I can probably identify the interest groups involved. It’s not clear I would be able to or have any control over interest groups at the federal level and it’s probably a bit of a waste of my time as an individual to do so.

In this is probably also a lesson for wannabe politicians of all political stripes: understand and have a vision that is compatible with the particular level of governance you’ll be occupying. I’m not sure why my local town needs a plan for “climate refugees”, but I will freely admit the federal government might want one. Local politicians can be freed from ideology in large part because so much of local politics crosses over ideological lines. Introducing those ideological lines back in is not only counterproductive, but possibly also dangerous or at least corrupting.  

Finally, and this might be the most important lesson: local politics is a unique place where partisanship has a harder time taking root than at other levels. As such, it might be the last bastion of true community, relatively free from the ugliness of partisanship. It’s still possible to run personalistic campaigns at the local level, campaigns that overcome partisan divides, build bridges between different political ideologies, and use community resources to solve community problems. Ideological politics divides us, but local politics has the potential to unite us. But that can only happen if local politicians focus on the issues that bring members of the community together, as opposed to on large-scale divisive issues that are inappropriate for the local level in the first place. If you turn walkability or historic preservation or potholes or school speed zones into partisan issues, you're either fundamentally misunderstanding what local politics actually is or you're an ideologue who has no business in local politics in the first place. Voters can, and should, reject these kinds of partisan divisions and instead vote for the person who has the competence to tackle the potholes in the street and who can get out of the way of their neighbors cultivating their own unique gardens.

So, what do you think? What do you want to see from your local officials? What kinds of issues should local government focus on and why? Tell us in the comments!